The human face: prime currency of virtual empires

An entire online attention economy has been built around the pull of the human face. Is it sustainable, or is it unnatural?

- Shephali Bhatt

Manav Jain can no longer ignore how screens are rewriting his sense of faces.

The 25-year-old product manager from Bengaluru recently returned to his hometown, Mumbai, after staying in touch with family through video calls that convinced him he had kept up with what’s going on. That illusion shattered the moment he saw his mother in person. “She had a few wrinkles. My mother was ageing,” he says, typing AGEING in all caps on text to underline his shock.

He hadn’t considered the way many video-calling apps apply face-smoothing filters by default. What unsettles him more is that this distortion turns inward, too. “There have been times looking at the mirror where I felt I am not looking good,” he says. “I am so used to looking at my prettier face on cameras, that I felt bad.” Part of it, he thinks, is the sheer scale of exposure.

We see more faces on our social media feeds before breakfast than previous generations might have seen in a year. The human brain detects a face within 100 to 170 milliseconds—faster than it processes almost any other visual stimulus—through a dedicated neural network that evolved over millions of years in a world where most people encountered a few hundred faces at most in a lifetime. But today, an entire attention economy has been engineered around the pull of the face.

In February 2021, researchers at Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab published a study on “Zoom Fatigue”, titled Nonverbal Overload: Theoretical Argument for the Causes of ‘Zoom Fatigue’. The study identified four reasons why video calls left people drained in ways in-person meetings never had: “hyper-gaze, non-verbal overload, reduced mobility, and mirror anxiety—the unprecedented experience of watching your own face in real time for hours every day.”